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Hijacking history

Op-ed from the Sydney Morning Herald, making the point that, after all the bluster and swaggering of the Bush Administration, they’ve accomplished very little in preventing another 9/11.

Everything changed when the first plane struck on September 11. America was the empire on its knees and all the old certainties lay in the rubble. But, writes Paul McGeough, the carnage of that day may be dwarfed by the conflict to come.

All of this means that any comfort Americans might have taken from the dramatic collapse of the Taliban regime and the dispersal of the al-Qaeda hierarchy should pale against the network’s profile one year on. Bin Laden and most of his key lieutenants are almost certainly alive, they are cashed up, they are geared for operating under what might appear to be a fractured command structure and, some intelligence sources say, they still have a sleeper cell in the US that was independent of the September11 operation.

They say it is underground, biding its time, and it has plans for another attack.